Meet the group shaking up the City old boys’ club
The 93 per cent Club is looking to break down the class barriers still running through the City. Founder Sophie Pender tell Morning Wire there’s still plenty of work to be done.
Sophie Pender was never meant to be called Sophie. Her parents named her Sophia and the doctors spelt it wrong on the birth certificate. By the time her mum realised the mistake, she was back at home and couldn’t afford the bus fare to the hospital to correct it.
Pender – a lawyer and founder of state-educated City network the 93 per cent Club – doesn’t have a biography like many in the world of corporate law. She was born to an alcoholic father in a one bed hostel room and supported herself through school working at McDonalds.
“[Working in the City] always felt very aspirational, which I think is the sad thing,” she tells Morning Wire
“It’s almost like you see it as a bit of a dream and you’re so excited for it. And then I think once you get there, it comes crashing down to reality. It’s like, I’ve always wanted this, but this doesn’t want me.”
Now though, she’s trying to change that. The group has formed a coalition of students, professionals and employers to try and rebalance socio-economic make-up of the City and break the ‘class ceiling’ blocking access to the corporate world.
But even amid the scramble of firms to pin their colours to the diversity and inclusion over the past five years, she says it’s something of an uphill battle.
Raising the question
Class is an outlier in the diversity conversation. Half of firms in the UK now have an official diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, government-commissioned initiatives have been launched to try and boost the racial and gender diversity in the boardroom, and City regulators have even rolled out new guidelines last month to boost diversity – a move they said would “support healthy work cultures, reduce groupthink and unlock talent”.
But unlike racial and gender characteristics, socio-economic background is not a so-called “protected characteristic”. And while she’s fully behind the wider City diversity drive, Pender says class has been left out of the conversation.
“I go to loads of D&I events and they’ll rattle off every protected characteristic and class is still missed among them,” she says.
“There’s a couple of reasons for it, but I think Britain has a massive class problem. It always has had a massive class problem. It’s so unique compared to other countries in that the royal family, private schools and all these institutions are very British.
“That leaves a situation in which there’s so much shame in class.”
The numbers in UK professional roles bear out the lack of progress. People from higher socio-economic backgrounds are more than twice as likely to be found in senior roles in financial services compared with those from lower socio-economic backgrounds – and half of senior roles in the sector are held by white people from a higher socio-economic background, according to a report from campaign group Progress Together.
Silence is one of the things stifling the wider debate, she says. When working class kids land top job in the City, “they just want to forget about where they’ve come from”.
“It’s traumatic – there’s a lot of trauma when you discuss class, and I think people just want to forget about it. [In] polite conversation, no one wants to talk about those sorts of things.”
Lifting the debate
The 93 per cent Club’s efforts to start lifting the volume of the debate have clearly struck a nerve, however. The group now operates in 35 campuses around the country with 5000 students on its books and a 6800 strong waiting list to join its newly launched professional network in the City.
Dubbing itself the UK’s “least exclusive members club”, it’s now trying to take on and provide an alternative to the traditional ‘leg ups’ associated with connections in the City – running mock interviews, CV workshops and taking professional LinkedIn headshots for those trying to find jobs at big corporates.
Employers are getting on board. It already counts firms like EY, BCG and Slaughter and May among its backers, all of whom now source junior employees through its initiatives.
And for her own efforts Pender has won inclusion to Forbes 30 under 30 and a list of fans across the political divide including Alastair Campbell and former Tory education secretary Justine Greening.
Recruitment troubles
But while the 93 per cent Club has won plaudits for drawing attention to class, the reception has not been unanimously warm
After she founded the group at the University of Bristol in 2016 she was promptly hit by a piece in the student newspaper accusing her of being a communist.
“I have a Facebook message from the guy who wrote it apologising and saying, ‘My dad’s one of the head MDs at Marshall McLennan if you need anything, let me know. I’m so sorry’,” she chuckles.
While corporates are throwing their weight behind the move in the City, in the less visible world of universities where firms go to source top talent, the issues can still run deep.
One of her previous employers used to go and have “fancy dinners with the law club” of certain universities, and the law club would determine who was on the guestlist.
“If you were someone who probably didn’t know a law club existed and would never have known to put an application in, and found fancy dinners quite intimidating, you would have never have met that employer,” she adds.
“I think the format of recruitment events is something that is a real issue that isn’t being discussed.”
Class ceiling
Even while invisible barriers run round City firms, she insists they represent opportunity and “changed my life in a really meaningful way”. Rather than supplant the ‘who you know’ culture that has dominated the sector and financial services for decades, she’s just trying to democratise it.
“Everyone’s got connections. Growing up working class, I had those connections if I wanted to become a plumber or an electrician or a hairdresser, but I think what we want is a world in which these connections flow from all job opportunities and all different socio economic groups,” she says.
After the 93 per cent was forced to freeze its registration form following a deluge of applications last month, they may be closer to smashing the City’s class ceiling quicker than they expected.